How Data Enrichment Makes Web Forms Smarter (Without Annoying Users)
Because re-typing the same information is not a personality trait.
Having to enter information into online forms isn’t particularly enjoyable at the best of times, especially when you know the organisation already has the information they are asking you to retype, or even worse, you’ve already had to enter it on the previous page.
This problem gets even more complex with previously entered data or building in a generic platform that isn’t being coded bespoke. How do you know the person filling out the form is the same person as before? How do you safely fetch existing data without making assumptions, or worse, getting it wrong?
Before FormWork, we ran into this problem constantly. We needed a way to:
- Reuse data that already exists
- Enrich forms with data we couldn’t reasonably store ourselves
- Show previously entered data back to users for validation
So we built it properly.
Data enrichment in FormWork
FormWork supports data enrichment for web forms in three distinct ways:
- Data you already have when building the form
- Data you don’t have (and probably never want to store)
- Data previously entered by the user
Let’s walk through them.
1. Data you already have when building the form
Some datasets are finite and predictable. Counties in the UK. Car manufacturers. Product codes. That sort of thing.
These are things you can — and should — prepare in advance.
With FormWork, you can import existing datasets in a simple table format and reference them directly inside your forms. These datasets can then be used to populate select fields, autocomplete inputs, or lookup fields.
Need only a subset of the data? No problem. You can filter options using multiple criteria before they ever reach the user.
So if you’re trying to find a part number for a specific make and model of car, FormWork can do that — without dumping a thousand irrelevant options into a dropdown and calling it UX.
2. Data you don’t have (and shouldn’t try to store)
Some data sources are enormous, tens of gigabytes, constantly changing, or both!
Storing all of that inside your form platform would be madness — and in many cases, completely impractical.
Instead, FormWork lets you enrich form data by connecting to external systems via API integrations. You can retrieve data from third-party services, internal platforms, or real-time sources as the user fills in the form.
Weather data? Live availability? Customer records in another system? Fine.
You can configure API-powered data enrichment directly in FormWork without additional coding, pulling in exactly the data you need, when you need it — and only then.
No bulk imports. No nightly sync jobs. No quiet dread.
3. Data previously entered by the user
We’ve all had that conversation:
“Can you confirm your details for me?”
“I already did.”
“Yes, but I need you to do it again.”
We wanted to remove that moment entirely.
FormWork allows you to reference previously entered form data later in the same form or reuse it in future forms. You can also save values into data tables, making them available as selectable options across your project.
That means you can:
- Pre-fill form fields with known values
- Show users what they entered last time and ask them to confirm it
- Reference data from other forms entirely
So yes — if you really wanted to build a form that determines which member of your family is on washing-up duty tonight from a list of people you previously entered, you absolutely could.
Maybe a slightly odd use of data enrichment.
We’re not judging.
…Much.
Data enrichment for web forms, done properly
The important bit: all three data enrichment methods update in real time as the user fills in the form.
That means users can:
- Validate pre-filled data
- Correct it if it’s wrong
- See exactly where values are coming from
Or, if you prefer, you can store enriched data in admin-only fields for your own use — safely out of view.
We built FormWork because we could never do these things cleanly with the form platforms available to us over the years.
Now you can.
Go build something amazing. Or at the very least, something that doesn’t ask people for the same information twice.
— Simon & Andrius